Spring Cleaning

An Uncanny Story for STSC Symposium: Spring Cleaning

Photo by Serena T on Unsplash

Some impressions stuck with him. The warm Spring day. The city’s streets filled with thickly cherry-blossomed trees that smelled like the perfume aisles of Macy’s department store. The brick and marble buildings becoming cleaner and heavier the closer they walked to the National Mall. His memories really began at the National Mall.

He was six. The adults of the crowd towered over him and he could not see much beyond them. He clung to his father’s hand, who lead him carefully and determinedly toward the imposing security barriers to the temporary stadium they erected around the length of the east lawn.

The line toward the stadium was a labyrinth of metal police barricades that stretched the remainder of the Mall. Outside of the barricades, onlookers searched for ticket scalpers while opportunists shilled tourist souvenirs and event memorabilia, red and white stripes and star-spangled fields of blue being a common motif. Many items — hats, sunglasses, tee-shirts, bumper stickers — had the year in gaudy curlicued script.

𝒮𝒫𝑅𝐼𝒩𝒢 𝒞𝐿𝐸𝒜𝒩𝐼𝒩𝒢 - 𝟸𝟶𝟼𝟾.

Perhaps it was the roundness of the numerals, but the curvy script pleased him. It was right, it seemed, for him to be here on this year, when the numbers were wide and plump. Did his dad know, and that is why they came this year? He mused on whether adults enjoyed writing rounder numbers more than sharper numbers, and whether the people who made the cheap plastic souvenirs were as satisfied by the year as he was.

However, once they reached 3rd Street and the queue started bending around toward the edges of the stadium, the hawkers and their posterboards of metal buttons and noose-shaped brooches started fading away into louder and more garish picket-signs. These signs had the jagged, weighty mis-planning of his own six-year-old schoolwork, where letters were sometimes fitted drastically small to prevent running off the page. He couldn’t read all the signs waving above him, but the one thing he understood was that they were hand-made by the people carrying them, instead of by whatever place ‘out there’ full of machines and logistics that seemed to supply the hawkers.

“What are those for?” he asked, tugging his father’s arm.

“Those are protestors,” his dad said. “Not everybody agrees with Spring Cleaning.”

“Why not?” the boy asked.

“Some people are against capital punishment of any form. They see it as barbaric. Others just don’t think it’s fair. They think the ‘goat shouldn’t be punished for his accomplishments. Or hers,” his father looked around, “though it’s always worked out to be a man so far.”